Alex (Killarny Brothers 2)

Pete shook his head. “Tax purposes. You’ll thank me in the end.” He looked up at me, and his expression changed. “You okay?”

I shook my head and sat down in the chair across from his desk in a heap.

“Hell no, I’m not. I just saw Madison Graston at McCall’s Hardware. Jesus, Pete. I haven’t seen the girl in ten years, and there she is, practically on our doorstep. I ran right into her…literally, right smack dab into her.”

“As I recall, that was a regular occurrence for the two of you back in the day.”

I shot him a look. “Go to hell. I just don’t have a clue what

she’s doing back in town. I never thought I’d see her again.”

Pete shrugged absently. “Well, her dad does just live a few miles away. It’s a wonder you haven’t seen her at all. I’m sure she’s home around the holidays.”

I was certain she was as well. There had been plenty of times that I had seen a car I didn’t recognize parked at the Graston place and I had assumed it was either her or her sister there, but I hadn’t dared to get close enough to find out. As far as I was concerned the girl was a chapter in my life that was completely closed. She had made the decision long ago.

“So, did the two of you make up or did you run away with your tail tucked between your legs?”

“She was out of there before I got a chance to say anything,” I said.

“Not that you were going to say anything, right?”

I shrugged my shoulders and looked down at my hands, dirty from working in the barn that morning. “Never have been much of a talker. And it seems like a waste of breath to try to make up with her. It was a long time ago, and it wasn’t anything that I did.”

Pete drew in a deep breath. He knew well enough what it was like to draw the ire of a woman because of something our father was involved with, although I had to think that in my situation it was a little more severe. The man had taken almost everything that Maddy’s father owned and left the man nearly destitute, forcing him to rent land from us if he wanted to continue using it for his cattle.

“Is there anything we could do about that?” I asked out of the blue. My father wasn’t around, and Pete had much more of a heart than the old man did. If Pete was making the decisions and there was something that could be done to restore George Graston to what he once was then Pete would be the one to make it happen.

He shook his head solemnly. “I’d have to talk to the attorney. I think it’s pretty tied up. If I recall, Dad has it pretty secured and bound to some other land in his will. I think it would require his permission to do anything with it and you know that there’s no way that’s ever going to happen.”

I did know. Our father had dug the heels of his boots into the ground on this matter a decade ago and as far as I knew they were still firmly planted.

“Okay, well. I got a little distracted in town and failed to stop by the vet’s office. Which is a damn shame because in this state I’m sure I would have made a fine impression on whoever the new lady is.”

Pete chuckled. “Maybe you should ask her out on a date.”

I rolled my eyes. “You think you could have your secretary call in tomorrow and give the vet the count I have of the mares that need to be checked? I just want whoever it is to be prepared for the numbers we have this year.”

My older brother nodded, and I wrote down the count for him.

“So what are you going to do?”

“About what?”

“About Madison Graston being in town. You two were practically engaged the last time you saw her. You aren’t going to talk about it?”

I shook my head. “Water under the bridge. And for all I know, she’s just here for a few days to help her dad with something. It’s not as if she moved back into town. That wouldn’t be like her. She was always more suited to city life. I didn’t really think the country had much to offer her.”

“You never know. People change.”

I got up and left Pete’s office, needing a breath of fresh air again. Being inside, cooped up in the house was too much for me right now. I hated that a thirty-second run-in with a girl I had dated in high school was getting to me in this way. What I wanted was to go back to the way things were before, forgetting that Maddy even existed. I had gone such a long time without even thinking her name. Not that it didn’t pop into my mind every once in a while. I thought about her every time I went to the cemetery to put new flowers on my mother’s grave. Her mother’s headstone was within my line of sight, and I always walked over to see how fresh the flowers were. I knew that her father sometimes came by and placed a bunch of the roses that grew around their place in the spring. I had seen him there a few times doing just that. The man never paid me any mind, not since everything that had happened between him and my father. I couldn’t blame him for not wanting anything to do with us. In fact, so used was I to being shunned by George Graston, that seeing Maddy and having her speak to me was shocking in itself.

I could apologize for what my father had done, but there was nothing I could do to take back the impact his actions had on their family. And if that meant never speaking to Maddy again, well…I had gone this long, and I could go longer.

I walked along the road down to the barn to check on a few of the horses that looked like they might need some attention paid to their hooves, but all along the way my thoughts stayed on Maddy, and I wondered why she was back in town.

A part of her must have still been a little bit of the girl I had known, but it was clear she had matured into a woman. And no matter what I thought about her or her family or any chance I had of speaking to her again, I couldn’t help but think how much I wanted her. Maddy had been my first back when we were teenagers. God, to think how dumb and impulsive I had been then, and how patient she must have been with me in retrospect. I laughed a little at that thought, knowing I had learned a little along the way and that my level of experience had certainly gone up since the last time I was with her, and I wished that somehow I could get the chance to show her that.

She was so fucking beautiful, and nothing about that had changed. I remembered the way her body looked in the moonlight the first time we were together, in the most country kid way possible like something out of a song—in the bed of my truck. It was the only privacy we could find, outside of sneaking out to the barn and I had a little more class than that. Maddy was a stunner, and she was going to go places. Neither of us were truly country kids at heart, at least not in the redneck way like so many of our peers were. I had wanted to give her so much more, but as a kid not even out of high school there wasn’t much I could manage.